Syrian Rebels Seize Israel Border Crossing

Syrian rebel factions, including al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, seized the nation’s only border crossing into neighboring Israel, in the Golan Heights. The takeover puts al-Qaeda directly on the Israeli frontier.
The clashes ahead of the takeover saw a stray mortar shell entering into Israeli occupied Golan, lightly wounding an Israeli soldier. Israel responded by attacking multiple Syrian Army positions in the area.

Israeli Army spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner downplayed the situation, insist it is “not a conflict that we are involved in.” Even though Israel has been keen to undermine Assad in the war, it’s hard to see how having al-Qaeda on their border is a preferred situation.

Israel has had a comparatively small number of troops in the Golan frontier because of the Gaza War, but as the ceasefire holds Israel is said to be redeploying some of those troops back to the north.

Author: Jason Ditz

7 thoughts on “Syrian Rebels Seize Israel Border Crossing”

This is becoming more bizarre by the moment, rebels attack and captured the Syrian border post at which point Israel fired artillery at Syrian’s position in retaliation for a stray shell that landed inside Israel and ignoring the rebels who is at their doorstep. This is looking bad for Assad.

Think about it: "rebels" inside Syria were attacking the border post. Syrian defenders would have been firing into Syria, while the "rebels" would have been firing towards Israel (the border post). So it is most likely that the stray shell that injured an Israeli soldier was fired by the "rebels." But Israel. the Mad Dog of the Middle East, attacks Syrian army positions. The only surprise here is that Israel didn't use this as an excuse to begin bombing Gaza again.

One has to wonder if the Golani Brigade wasn't sent to Gaza as a warm-up training exercise for going into action back on their regular turf up on the Heights. Sooner or later, Israel is going to want a wider buffer zone between them and what will undoubtedly be ISIS massing nearby. I, for one, would be glued to my seat with multiple screens going (and popcorn, of course) if things boiled down to an ISIS-Israel showdown.